Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
OSWEGO - Bruce Stambler loves his work.
Even when he put in those 45- to 100-plus hour work weeks for eight months, he loved his job. Sometimes he worked 15 hours a day. Other days it crept up to 18. Still, he could never see himself doing anything else.
Some people would get paid overtime for hours like that. Others would earn a hefty bonus.
Stambler's reward weighed 12 pounds.
An Oscar.
He received the Oscar in March 1997 for his sound editing in "The Ghost and the Darkness," a movie about two lions in Africa that hunt and kill people for the fun of it. Killing those two stealthy lions proves near impossible - they disappear like ghosts. Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer star as the lion hunters.
And now in early July, Stambler, a California native, hacked a few weeks out of his schedule for a well-deserved break.
Bruce, wife Nancy and children Kelly, 14, and Robby, 11, recently spent time on Tippecanoe Lake, visiting Bill and Susan Allen's lakefront home. Susan is Stambler's sister-in-law.
Stambler, 44, plays on his vacations the same way he works on his sound editing.
He goes all out.
On a perfect July Saturday morning, Stambler, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, walks in from the deck overlooking the lake. Sunglasses dangle from his neck. He grabs the list of questions from the reporter, eyes scanning downward as he reads over them.
He nods his head. He's ready.
Stambler is a supervising sound editor, which means he is responsible for all sound you hear in a movie except for the music. Dialogue, sound effects and so forth.
And Stambler isn't your garden-variety supervising sound editor. Remember recent blockbusters like "Under Siege," "The Fugitive," "Clear and Present Danger" and "Batman Forever"?
Stambler did the sound editing for all those movies.
So successful was he that he earned Oscar nominations for all of them.
Only this year did he win.
"Don't let anyone tell you it's not cool to win," he says. "I'm here to tell you it's totally cool to win."
And no, he never saw the Oscar coming. He never felt that "this may be the special one" feeling.
"I had no idea at all," he says. "When you think that they make 300 movies a year ... that's a lot of movies. There's too many good movies. You have no idea, no idea at all."
Even the night of the ceremony, he didn't know. Oscar winners are not told before the show. Everything's live.
What he did know was that he had choice seats.
"The movie 'The English Patient' won everything," he says. "We were surrounded by English Patient people, which was cool, because they kept getting up to get their awards. It was wild. It was like it became an infectious area."
Stambler picked up the infection when MTV's Beavis and Butthead (seriously) pulled his name out of the envelope.
His first thoughts after Beavis called his name?
"Don't trip on the way up," he says.
"I wanted a podium that was close. I didn't want to blow it, and I wanted to make sure I could find my little speech and read it really fast. You have 45 seconds. Then they pull the plug."
The first phone call Stambler received? A congratulatory message left by Douglas.
Stambler has won an Emmy, a British Academy Award and an award from Motion Picture Sound Editors. The Oscar is the award above all awards.
"This," he says, "opens the door."
Indeed. In his two weeks at Tippecanoe Lake, the calls from Hollywood were at 10 and counting.
"I get a lot more people who want to work with me," he says. "And now I can work on projects I really want to work on. I can be more selective. I wanted to work with Kevin Costner, so I went after it and ended up getting it."
When Stambler returns, he will go to work on Costner's latest movie.
But California is thousands of miles away from Indiana. The lake calls.
"We don't get here enough," he says. "We've gone Wet Biking, swimming, skiing, tubing and fishing. We've done just about everything you can do in the water."
Living in California, Stambler says, is one drawback. He would much rather rear his children at Tippecanoe Lake.
Minor details, sister-in-law Susan says. She pops in the videotape of the Oscar ceremonies. They've played it over and over, but tears still come to her eyes every time she listens to Bruce's speech.
She, for one, sees how much he enjoys his job. Yes, he's on vacation. No, he didn't leave his work behind.
"He brought his sound equipment out here," she says. "He's been driving around the lake, recording sounds. As long as he can keep being selective, he loves his job."
